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The other day Joel, our three year old, wanted to wrestle.
This is pretty normal he loves it… He can’t get enough… There is one problem…

He always looses…

Every time…
I win ALL wrestling matches ever….

But the other day I realized something, I might win every time….

That does not stop him from wrestling just as hard the next time….
No matter how quickly he lost, he gets up thinking “this could be the time that I win”…
He doesn’t look at his past failures, his miserable losses, he thinks he can win… Every time we face off..

Wrestling with dad is teaching Joel endurance and the courage to get up and try again…

What if we all lived like that, so stubborn, so naive to our past, so excited about the future… So quick to jump back in give it another chance.

As his dad I know, with every wrestling match, he gets stronger… It really is only a matter or time before he beats me…

* Sometimes it seems that we as humans are so afraid of failing at something we never even attempt to try. But this question is one that has haunted me for awhile now…. Am I willing to fail in order to succeed?

This is a question that we can all relate with.. Am I willing to look like a fool or suffer through those awkward self imposed inadequacies in order to tell the love of my life that I actually love them? Am I willing to pick up a snowboard and fall or fail on my but 10-100 times before Im actually able to do get down the hill in the assumed style of a snowboarder? Am I willing to start a conversation with someone who does not know Christ even though i feel that i don’t have all the right answers and may feel like a failure? Am I willing to fail in order to learn how to drive a car?

Sometimes I think we play the What If game on the wrong side of the court…. We say things like what if I never did this for the wrong decisions we have made in our life… I think maybe we should think about the What If’s from the good decisions and the good experiences of our life…. What if, We never mustered up the courage to tell that person we loved them! What if they never gathered the courage to tell YOU! What if in your failing of learning to snowboard you gave up, you would have missed out on the great time friends and the excitement of making it to the bottom of the hill in one piece, not to mention the view at the top of the mountain! Or What If’ that person never started that sometimes hard conversation with you about Jesus and what He did on the cross for us? What if you never got over your fear of driving cars you would have missed out on the great experiences of the freedom of driving down the road and off into the sunset, going wherever you want take yourself!

It was said in the book IT… “Failure is not an option… its Mandatory!”

I think if we were honest with ourselves… we are great at failing! We do it all the time! If we didn’t we would never be GOOD at anything! We would live life in our bubble of fear crippled and unable to do anything…

So the question I ask for Leaders is this… Why if are so used to failing naturally…. Why aren’t we trying new things with our areas leadership…. What if the very thing we needed was a good fail in order to find out thats not how it is most effective with the freedom to try again!

Giving each other the freedom to fail and still love is quite possibly the greatest thing we as humans can give each other…

If we want to be effective leaders and humans we must learn to Fail and Fail Forward!